Wilderness Area

This morning I finally went out to face my yard. It has been several weeks since we abdicated responsibility for the lawn. My wife has engineered an interesting series of pipes, ducts and siphons to create a gray water system that brings a little water to one corner of the front yard, but for the most part, it's dry and yellow out there.
Again, I say "for the most part" because there are still patches along the side of the house and next to the fence that have defied convention and continued to grow. Yesterday I noticed that many of these patches had reached the height that set off my internal alarm. I'm a yard ape, like my older brother before me, I feel the call of lawn care and maintenance. It may be genetic, or it may be that as children we were both exposed to David Hornsby's yard.
David Hornsby was our piano teacher. He was a very nice man, and taught me a great many things, not the least of which is still in my repertoire: "The Little Drummer Boy." That Christmas carol not withstanding, the other thing that made a lasting impression on me was the swirl of grass and shrubs that nearly obscured the front of his house. I remember the polite suggestions being made first to my older brother, then to me as I came of age that "a good way to make some extra money" might be to ask for the opportunity to shape the Mister Hornsby's overgrown tangle of weeds into something resembling a lawn.
It was never a regular gig. I definitely got the impression that, being an artistic type, my piano teacher didn't want to have any rigid parameters for his yard, especially any that might cause him to eventually become involved in maintaining. So there were a few desperate, onerous attempts to tame what my mother first dubbed "The Wilderness Area." Each time, it took several hours and pitchers of iced tea to cut and trim until we eventually surrendered to the inevitable. You could hear the grass growing behind your back as you whacked furiously at the mess in front. Finally, as the sun began to set, we hauled our bent tools and smoking mower to the family station wagon, knowing that we had given it our all, but maybe not our best.
Over the next few summers, I turned my focus to the tiny patches of grass that lay between the mobile homes at the trailer park where my new piano teacher lived. I could knock out six of these little plots in the time it took me to make a path in Hornsby's yard. It was, by comparison, easy money. But every time I drove by the Wilderness Area, which sat on the corner of a regular thoroughfare, I felt a twinge.
That was the twinge I felt this morning as I pulled on my gloves and unspooled the extension cord. I powered up the trimmer and whacked at the weeds, and pulled up the blackberry runners. I tried to get things to a place that at least looked level. It doesn't have to be green, and it doesn't have to be pretty, but it shouldn't be dangerous. Then I turned my attention to the plants inside. I can still save them.